A New Year's Resolution as a Patient
Today is the day to start the New Year’s resolutions. Back on December 31, 2004 I posted here a thread titled “A Few Physician’s New Year’s Resolutions” which suggested three ways physicians might change and hopefully improve their practice and their impression on their patients.
For this year Resolution thread, how about considering what would be their own personal resolutions which my visitors might select as being important as they relate to their life experience as a patient in a doctor’s office and which they think might be reasonable to follow. Or maybe I am making an impossible request. It is hard enough to follow a resolution just dealing with yourself (like lose weight, stop smoking, keep your desk clean and orderly and so on) but maybe it is almost impossible to follow a resolution when dealing with another party, particularly a physician who has another agenda.
Anyway, let’s give it a try. As a doctor,myself, who has been and surely will be a patient again, let me resolve to talk to my doctor as a patient and not as another doctor. Do you really think I can do that? ..Maurice.
posted by Maurice Bernstein, M.D. @ 6:41:00 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Nope, I think it's impossible. We are what we are. You will talk to your doctor like you're a doctor just like I talk to my doctor like I'm a nurse. It's just the way it is!
And yet, isn't it true that speaking to a doctor like a doctor or a nurse could lead to the physician slipping into Very Important Person treatment which never has been found to be medically beneficial and perhaps even harmful to the patient compared with routine patient treatment. Also when you, as a nurse talk like a nurse to the treating physician, he or she is likely to skip over important information or explanations which they assume you already know. That is a bad practice. So, even though it is hard and kind of deminishing your ego, I think a medical professional who is sick should behave like a non-professional when being cared for by their doctor. ..Maurice.
You should discuss the situation based upon whatever level of knowledge that you possess.
When I am going to be seeing a doctor for a specific reason, I will almost always research quite a bit of medical information so I have an understanding of what the available options might be and a little bit about the pros and cons of each approach. There is limited time for the appointment and certainly not enough time to go over everything.
I will of usually defer to the expert opinion of the doctor, unless I have had a bad reaction in the past to what is being proposed, so he can come up with an approach that will work.
No hospital is likely to be equipped to carry out everything that can be found by searching the internet, so that is why in the end the doctor needs to make the decision based upon what he or she can best carry out.
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